Does the Kindle appeal more to the over-40 crowd? An inaccurate sampling indicates maybe.
Does the Amazon Kindle appeal more to people over 40? A forum post with over 1700 responses indicates maybe, but Obsessable cautions that it is far too small of a sampling to tell for sure.
The author of the Kindle Culture blog, as well as a forth-coming book by the same name, has conducted a very unscientific and statistically inaccurate study of the average age of Kindle users. The study was conducted by counting the responses of people to this thread on Average Kindle Owner's Age of the official Amazon's Kindle forums. The forum topic only has 1742 posts at the time I am writing this, and that number is probably already greater than the number of actual respondents, because of people commenting multiple times in the thread. The Kindle Culture blog acknowledges several additional problems with the data collected, noting:
"Though I ended up culling 1,387 responses from almost 1,700 posts, these charts don't adhere to polling science standards and should thus be taken with a grain of salt. That said, my methodology included the use of second-hand figures ("my son, 27, has one too"), and the exclusion of ill-defined ages ("I'm in my 50s"), questionable responses (106-year-old Sigmund Freud says, "I like the large type!"), and a handful of entries that were repeated one or more times."
To say that these results should be "taken with a grain of salt" is a huge understatement and gloss of the inaccuracy presented by this report. The original Kindle did so well in its first year that it was regularly sold out and hard to find. Also, during Amazon's recent Q1 earnings announcements, the company said that sales of the Kindle 2 were better than expected. Although Amazon has remained very tight-lipped with any sort of specific numbers of sales, one can make a very conservative assumption that all sold Kindles to date at least number over 100,000 units. 1,387 out of an assumed well of over 100,000 Kindles sold since the original Kindle was introduced in November of 2007 is less than 2%, and 2% is generally the margin for error in properly conducted statistical surveys.
In all likelihood, this study is more indicative of the people who are using Amazon's Official Kindle forums being in an older age bracket than anything else.
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Comments (4)
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Zack
(12:25 PM on Fri May 1, 2009)
Actually, 2% of the population, providing it is a significant and random sample is more than enough to generate generalized information about the population at large. Many nationally conducted polls of the population at large only contain between 4000-60......00 respondents. But sample size isn't as important as ensuring a simple random sample, wherein every member of the population has an equal chance to participate. This isn't possible by the numbers on a specific forum, unless it is proven every Kindle owner visits it ... which it isn't. (Also, I would put the estimates of sales at much much higher. Most are say around 500,000 for both products, though I have seen as high as 500K for K1 and 300K for K2.
So the flaw isn't with the size, but rather the isolated sample of just one forum.
Now, as a grad student in Communications I conducted a very similar sample using this forum, but a number of other sources as well. Out of 442 respondents (which, again, would be representative provided it is truly random, which I feel it is). This forum represented about 40% of my responses. My sampling was a bit more scientific, and this may surprise you, found almost the exact same numbers as Kindle Culture. I found 69% over the age of 40. 24% of respondents were 41-50, 29% 51-60...... and 16% over 61.
I found this very surprisining and haven't fully fleshed out the reasons yet. I have a number of other demographics that I need to crunch to determine what role they play in who is likely to purchase a Kindle. Definitely some interesting findings though.
C.K. Sample III
(12:32 PM on Fri May 1, 2009)
Interesting. You should put together your numbers and the sources and publish it somewhere online so that we can examine and compare to the Kindle Culture numbers.
I think your 500K estimations are much more on target than the 100,000 I posited above.
Of course, we won't really have any assurance of an accurate sample unless Amazon conducts a survey and reveals the actual results, which I hope that they do.
Zack
(12:38 PM on Fri May 1, 2009)
I'm putting that together now ... should have the results in about a week or so on my site.
Actually, one of the interesting things I found while researching the Kindle is that analysts are using Sprint's numbers of activated accounts to determine when new Kindle are being activated ... that's one of the ways they same up with the numbers.
Also, though, I think Amazon will continue to play this pretty close to the vest until they have their own numbers and are satisfied with the results, whatever it is they are looking for. If I had to guess I would say they would not be to happy to discover that 70% of their users are over 40 ... though I could be wrong.
Stephen Peters
(1:47 PM on Fri May 1, 2009)
I agree with the author that my figures were fallible, and I want to reiterate that this "study" was anything but and meant for entertainment purposes only. I felt that saying the information and charts "don't adhere to polling science standards" was a clear disclaimer and certainly didn't mean to gloss over any inaccuracies. So rather than the aforementioned grain, I urge people to take my results with a 25-pound bag of Halite Rock Salt.
That said, I strongly believe based on everything I've seen that the truth about these figures is close to what the chart suggests. One of the first things I realized when I started this book was that the Kindle seemed to be tending towards an older-than-usual demographic with a strong word-of-mouth factor. After many months of full-time attention to the Kindle and its users, I am now even more convinced of this.
I was also aware of Zach's study and am looking forward to the results. I was hoping to use his statistics in the book but they were not available in time. Despite the potential skew, I believe the extent of his questions will provide the best glimpse yet of Kindle owners and their habits.